The Method

Here we are, right in Germany! We shall now have
to talk metaphysics while talking political economy. And in this again
we shall but follow M. Proudhon's “contradictions.” Just now he forced
us to speak English, to become pretty well English ourselves. Now the scene
is changing. M. Proudhon is transporting us to our dear fatherland and
is forcing us, whether we like it or not, to become German again.

If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms
hats into ideas. The Englishman is Ricardo, rich banker and distinguished
economist; the German is Hegel, simple professor at the University of Berlin.

Louis XV, the last absolute monarch and representative of the
decadence of French royalty, had attached to his person a physician who
was himself France's first economist. This doctor, this economist, represented
the imminent and certain triumph of the French bourgeoisie. Doctor Quesnay
made a science out of political economy; he summarized it in his famous
Tableau économique. Besides the thousand and one commentaries on
this table which have appeared, we possess one by the doctor himself. It
is the “Analysis of the Economic Table,” followed by “seven important observations.”

M. Proudhon is another Dr. Quesnay. He is the Quesnay of the metaphysics
of political economy.

Now metaphysics – indeed all philosophy – can be summed up,
according to Hegel, in method. We must, therefore, try to elucidate the
method of M. Proudhon, which is at least as foggy as the Economic Table.
It is for this reason that we are making seven more or less important observations.
If Dr. Proudhon is not pleased with our observations, well, then, he will
have to become an Abbe Baydeau and give the “explanation of the economico-metaphysical
method” himself.

First Observation

“We are not giving a history according to the order in time, but according
to the sequence of ideas. Economic phases or categories are in their manifestation
sometimes contemporary, sometimes inverted.... Economic theories have nonetheless
their logical sequence and their serial relation in the understanding:
it is this order that we flatter our- selves to have discovered."

(Proudhon, Vol. I, p. 146)

M. Proudhon most certainly wanted to frighten the French by flinging quasi-Hegelian
phrases at them. So we have to deal with two men: firstly with M. Proudhon,
and then with Hegel. How does M. Proudhon distinguish himself from other
economists? And what part does Hegel play in M. Proudhon's political economy?

Economists express the relations of bourgeois production, the
division of labour, credit, money, etc., as fixed, immutable, eternal categories.
M. Proudhon, who has these ready-made categories before him, wants to explain
to us the act of formation, the genesis of these categories, principles,
laws, ideas, thoughts.

Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned
relations, but what they do not explain is how
these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement
which gave them birth. M. Proudhon, taking these relations for principles,
categories, abstract thoughts, has merely to put into order these thoughts,
which are to be found alphabetically arranged at the end of every treatise
on political economy. The economists' material is the active, energetic
life of man; M. Proudhon's material is the dogmas of the economists. But
the moment we cease to pursue the historical movement of production relations,
of which the categories are but the theoretical expression, the moment
we want to see in these categories no more than ideas, spontaneous thoughts,
independent of real relations, we are forced to attribute the origin of
these thoughts to the movement of pure reason. How does pure, eternal,
impersonal reason give rise to these thoughts? How does it proceed in order
to produce them?

If we had M. Proudhon's intrepidity in the matter of Hegelianism
we should say: it is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this
mean? Impersonal reason, having outside itself neither a base on which
it can pose itself, nor an object to which it can oppose itself, nor a
subject with which it can compose itself, is forced to turn head over heels,
in posing itself, opposing itself and composing itself – position, opposition,
composition. Or, to speak Greek – we have thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
For those who do not know the Hegelian language, we shall give the ritual formula: affirmation, negation and
negation of the negation. That is what language means. It is certainly
not Hebrew (with due apologies to M. Proudhon); but it is the language of
this pure reason, separate from the individual. Instead of the ordinary
individual with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking we have nothing
but this ordinary manner purely and simply – without the individual.

Is it surprising that everything, in the final abstraction –
for we have here an abstraction, and not an analysis – presents itself
as a logical category? Is it surprising that, if you let drop little by
little all that constitutes the individuality of a house, leaving out first
of all the materials of which it is composed, then the form that distinguishes
it, you end up with nothing but a body; that, if you leave out of account
the limits of this body; you soon have nothing but a space – that if,
finally, you leave out of the account the dimensions of this space, there
is absolutely nothing left but pure quantity, the logical category? If
we abstract thus from every subject all the alleged accidents, animate
or inanimate, men or things, we are right in saying that in the final abstraction,
the only substance left is the logical category. Thus the metaphysicians
who, in making these abstractions, think they are making analyses, and
who, the more they detach themselves from things, imagine themselves to
be getting all the nearer to the point of penetrating to their core –
these metaphysicians in turn are right in saying that things here below
are embroideries of which the logical categories constitute the canvas.
This is what distinguishes the philosopher from the Christian. The Christian,
in spite of logic, has only one incarnation of the Logos; the philosopher
has never finished with incarnations. If all that exists, all that lives
on land, and under water, can be reduced by abstraction to a logical category
– if the whole real world can be drowned thus in a world of abstractions,
in the world of logical categories – who need be astonished at it?

All that exists, all that lives on land and under water, exists
and lives only by some kind of movement. Thus, the movement of history
produces social relations; industrial movement gives us industrial products,
etc.

Just as by means of abstraction we have transformed everything
into a logical category, so one has only to make an abstraction of every
characteristic distinctive of different movements to attain movement in
its abstract condition – purely formal movement, the purely logical formula
of movement. If one finds in logical categories the substance of all things,
one imagines one has found in the logical formula of movement the absolute
method, which not only explains all things, but also implies the movement
of things.

It is of this absolute method that Hegel speaks in these terms:

“Method is the absolute, unique, supreme, infinite force, which no
object can resist; it is the tendency of reason to find itself again, to
recognize itself in every object.”

(Logic, Vol. III [p. 29])

All things being reduced to a logical category, and every movement, every
act of production, to method, it follows naturally that every aggregate
of products and production, of objects and of movement, can be reduced
to a form of applied metaphysics. What Hegel has done for religion, law,
etc., M. Proudhon seeks to do for political economy.

So what is this absolute method? The abstraction of movement.
What is the abstraction of movement? Movement in abstract condition. What
is movement in abstract condition? The purely logical formula of movement
or the movement of pure reason. Wherein does the movement of pure reason
consist? In posing itself, opposing itself, composing itself; in formulating
itself as thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or, yet, in affirming itself,
negating itself, and negating its negation.

How does reason manage to affirm itself, to pose itself in a definite
category? That is the business of reason itself and of its apologists.

But once it has managed to pose itself as a thesis, this thesis,
this thought, opposed to itself, splits up into two contradictory thoughts
– the positive and the negative, the yes and no. The struggle between
these two antagonistic elements comprised in the antithesis constitutes
the dialectical movement. The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the
yes becoming both yes and no, the no becoming both no and yes, the contraries
balance, neutralize, paralyze each other. The fusion of these two contradictory
thoughts constitutes a new thought, which is the synthesis of them. This
thought splits up once again into two contradictory thoughts, which in
turn fuse into a new synthesis. Of this travail is born a group of thoughts.
This group of thoughts follows the same dialectic movement as the simple
category, and has a contradictory group as antithesis. Of these two groups
of thoughts is born a new group of thoughts, which is the antithesis of
them.

Just as from the dialectic movement of the simple categories is
born the group, so from the dialectic movement of the groups is born the
series, and from the dialectic movement of the series is born the entire
system.

Apply this method to the categories of political economy and you
have the logic and metaphysics of political economy, or, in other words,
you have the economic categories that everybody knows, translated into
a little-known language which makes them look as if they had never blossomed
forth in an intellect of pure reason; so much do these categories seem
to engender one another, to be linked up and intertwined with one another
by the very working of the dialectic movement. The reader must not get
alarmed at these metaphysics with all their scaffolding of categories,
groups, series, and systems. M. Proudhon, in spite of all the trouble he
has taken to scale the heights of the system of contradictions, has never
been able to raise himself above the first two rungs of simple thesis and
antithesis; and even these he has mounted only twice, and on one of these
two occasions he fell over backwards.

Up to now we have expounded only the dialectics of Hegel. We shall
see later how M. Proudhon has succeeded in reducing it to the meanest proportions.
Thus, for Hegel, all that has happened and is still happening is only just
what is happening in his own mind. Thus the philosophy of history is nothing
but the history of philosophy, of his own philosophy. There is no longer
a “history according to the order in time,” there is only “the sequence
of ideas in the understanding.” He thinks he is constructing the world
by the movement of thought, whereas he is merely reconstructing systematically
and classifying by the absolute method of thoughts which are in the minds
of all.

Second Observation

Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions
of the social relations of production, M. Proudhon, holding this upside
down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the
incarnation of the principles, of these categories, which were slumbering
– so M. Proudhon the philosopher tells us – in the bosom of the “impersonal
reason of humanity.”

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make
cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But
what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are
just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are
closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces
men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production,
in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social
relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill,
society with the industrial capitalist.

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity
with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories,
in conformity with their social relations.

Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the
relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.

There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces,
of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable
thing is the abstraction of movement – mors immortalis.

[Marx quotes these words from the following passage of Lucretius's
poem On The Nature of Things (Book III, line 869): “mortalem vitam
mors cum immortalis ademit” ("when mortal life has been taken away by immortal death").]

Third Observation

The production relations of every society form a whole. M. Proudhon
considers economic relations as so many social phases, engendering one
another, resulting one from the other like the antithesis from the thesis,
and realizing in their logical sequence the impersonal reason of humanity.

The only drawback to this method is that when he comes to examine
a single one of these phases, M. Proudhon cannot explain it without having
recourse to all the other relations of society; which relations, however,
he has not yet made his dialectic movement engender. When, after that,
M. Proudhon, by means of pure reason, proceeds to give birth to these other
phases, he treats them as if they were new-born babes. He forgets that
they are of the same age as the first.

Thus, to arrive at the constitution of value, which for him is
the basis of all economic evolutions, he could not do without division
of labour, competition, etc. Yet in the series, in the understanding of M.
Proudhon, in the logical sequence, these relations did not yet exist.

In constructing the edifice of an ideological system by means
of the categories of political economy, the limbs of the social system
are dislocated. The different limbs of society are converted into so many
separate societies, following one upon the other. How, indeed, could the
single logical formula of movement, of sequence, of time, explain the structure
of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one
another?

Fourth Observation

Let us see now to what modifications M. Proudhon subjects Hegel's dialectics
when he applies it to political economy.

For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides –
one good, the other bad. He looks upon these categories as the petty bourgeois
looks upon the great men of history: Napoleon was a great man; he did a
lot of good; he also did a lot of harm.

The good side and the bad side, the advantages and drawbacks,
taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic
category.

The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating
the bad.

Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has
its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good
side of slavery. Needless to say, we are dealing only with direct slavery,
with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North
America.

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry
as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without
cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies
their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world
trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is
an economic category of the greatest importance.

Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries,
would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off
the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of
modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will
have wiped America off the map of nations.[*1]

Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among
the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to
disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without
disguise upon the New World.

What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate
the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate
the bad.

Hegel has no problems to formulate. He has only dialectics. M.
Proudhon has nothing of Hegel's dialectics but the language. For him the
dialectic movement is the dogmatic distinction between good and bad.

Let us for a moment consider M. Proudhon himself as a category.
Let us examine his good and bad side, his advantages and his drawbacks.

If he has the advantage over Hegel of setting problems which he
reserves the right of solving for the greater good of humanity, he has
the drawback of being stricken with sterility when it is a question of
engendering a new category by dialectical birth-throes. What constitutes
dialectical movement is the coexistence of two contradictory sides, their
conflict and their fusion into a new category. The very setting of the
problem of eliminating the bad side cuts short the dialectic movement.
It is not the category which is posed and opposed to itself, by its contradictory
nature, it is M. Proudhon who gets excited, perplexed and frets and fumes
between the two sides of the category.

Caught thus in a blind alley, from which it is difficult to escape
by legal means, M. Proudhon takes a real flying leap which transports him
at one bound into a new category. Then it is that, to his astonished gaze,
is revealed the serial relation in the understanding.

He takes the first category that comes handy and attributes to
it arbitrarily the quality of supplying a remedy for the drawbacks of the
category to be purified. Thus, if we are to believe M. Proudhon, taxes
remedy the drawbacks of monopoly; the balance of trade, the drawbacks of
taxes; landed property, the drawbacks of credit.

By taking the economic categories thus successively, one by one,
and making one the antidote to the other, M. Proudhon manages to make with
this mixture of contradictions and antidotes to contradictions, two volumes
of contradictions, which he rightly entitles: Le Système des contradictions économiques.[The System of Economic Contradictions]

Fifth Observation

“In the absolute reason all these ideas... are equally simple, and
general.... In fact, we attain knowledge only by a sort of scaffolding
of our ideas. But truth in itself is independent of these dialectical symbols
and freed from the combinations of our minds.”

(Proudhon, Vol. II, p. 97)

Here all of a sudden, by a kind of switch-over of which we now know the
secret, the metaphysics of political economy has become an illusion! Never
has M. Proudhon spoken more truly. Indeed, from the moment the process
of the dialectic movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing
good to bad, and of administering one category as an antidote to another,
the categories are deprived of all spontaneity; the idea “ceases to function";
there is no life left in it. It is no longer posed or decomposed into categories.
The sequence of categories has become a sort of scaffolding. Dialectics
has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any
dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality.

When M. Proudhon spoke of the serial relation in understanding, of
the logical sequence of categories, he declared positively that he did
not want to give history according to the order in time, that is, in M.
Proudhon's view, the historical sequence in which the categories have manifested
themselves. Thus for him everything happened in the pure ether of reason.
Everything was to be derived from this ether by means of dialectics. Now
that he has to put this dialectics into practice, his reason is in default.
M. Proudhon's dialectics runs counter to Hegel's dialectics, and now we
have M. Proudhon reduced to saying that the order in which he gives the
economic categories is no longer the order in which they engender one
another. Economic evolutions are no longer the evolutions of reason itself.

What then does M. Proudhon give us? Real history, which is, according
to M. Proudhon's understanding, the sequence in which the categories have
manifested themselves in order of time? No! History as it takes place in
the idea itself? Still less! That is, neither the profane history of categories,
nor their sacred history! What history does he give us then? The history
of his own contradictions. Let us see how they go, and how they drag M.
Proudhon in their train.

Before entering upon this examination, which gives rise to the
sixth important observation, we have yet another, less important observation
to make.

Let us admit with M. Proudhon that real history, history according
to the order in time, is the historical sequence in which ideas, categories
and principles have manifested themselves.

Each principle has had its own century in which to manifest itself.
The principle of authority, for example, had the 11th century, just as
the principle of individualism had the 18th century. In logical sequence,
it was the century that belonged to the principle, and not the principle
which belonged to the century. When, consequently, in order to save principles
as much as to save history, we ask ourselves why a particular principle
was manifested in the 11th century or in the 18th century rather than in
any other, we are necessarily forced to examine minutely what men were
like in the 11th century, what they were like in the 18th, what were their
respective needs, their productive forces, their mode of production, the
raw materials of their production – in short, what were the relations
between man and man which resulted from all these conditions of existence.
To get to the bottom of all these questions – what is this but to draw
up the real, profane history of men in every century and to present these
men as both the authors and the actors of their own drama? But the moment
you present men as the actors and authors of their own history, you arrive
– by detour – at the real starting point, because you have abandoned
those eternal principles of which you spoke at the outset.

M. Proudhon has not even gone far enough along the crossroad which
an ideologist takes to reach the main road of history.

Sixth Observation

Let us take the crossroad with M. Proudhon.

We shall concede that economic relations, viewed as immutable
laws, eternal principles, ideal categories, existed before active and energetic
men did; we shall concede further that these laws, principles and categories
had, since the beginning of time, slumbered “in the impersonal reason of
humanity.” We have already seen that, with all these changeless and motionless
eternities, there is no history left; there is at most history in the idea,
that is, history reflected in the dialectic movement of pure reason. M.
Proudhon, by saying that, in the dialectic movement ideas are no longer
“differentiated,” has done away with both the shadow of movement and the
movement of shadows, by means of which one could still have created at
least a semblance of history. Instead of that, he imputes to history his
own impotence. He lays the blame on everything, even the French language.

“It is not correct then,” says M. Proudhon, the philosopher, “to say
that something appears, that something is produced: in civilization as
in the universe, everything has existed, has acted, from eternity. This
applies to the whole of social economy.”

(Vol. II, p. 102)

So great is the productive force of the contradictions which function and
which made M. Proudhon function, that, in trying to explain history, he
is forced to deny it; in trying to explain the successive appearance of
social relations, he denies that anything can appear: in trying to explain
production, with all its phases, he questions whether anything can be produced!

Thus, for M. Proudhon, there is no longer any history: no longer
any sequence of ideas. And yet his book still exists; and it is precisely
that book which is, to use his own expression, “history according to the
sequence of ideas.” How shall we find a formula, for M. Proudhon is a man
of formulas, to help him to clear all these contradictions in one leap?

To this end he has invented a new reason, which is neither the
pure and virgin absolute reason, nor the common reason of men living and
acting in different periods, but a reason quite apart – the reason of
the person, Society – of the subject, Humanity – which under the pen
of M. Proudhon figures at times also as “social genius,” “general reason,”
or finally as “human reason.” This reason, decked out under so many names,
betrays itself nevertheless, at every moment, as the individual reason
of M. Proudhon, with its good and its bad side, its antidotes and its problems.

“Human reason does not create truth,” hidden in the depths of
absolute, eternal reason. It can only unveil it. But such truths as it
has unveiled up to now are incomplete, insufficient, and consequently contradictory.
Hence, economic categories, being themselves truths discovered, revealed
by human reason, by social genius, are equally incomplete and contain within
themselves the germ of contradictions. Before M. Proudhon, social genius
saw only the antagonistic elements, and not the synthetic formula, both
hidden simultaneously in absolute reason. Economic relations, which merely
realize on earth these insufficient truths, these incomplete ideas, are
consequently contradictory in themselves, and present two sides, one good,
the other bad.

To find complete truth, the idea, in all its fullness, the synthetic
formula that is to annihilate the contradiction, this is the problem of
social genius. This again is why, in M. Proudhon's illusion, this same
social genius has been harried from one category to another without ever
having been able, despite all its battery of categories, to snatch from
God or from absolute reason, a synthetic formula.

“At first, society (social genius) states a primary fact, puts forward
a hypothesis... a veritable antinomy, whose antagonistic results develop
in the social economy in the same way as its consequences could have been
deduced in the mind; so that industrial movement, following in all things
the deduction of ideas, splits up into two currents, one of useful effects,
the other of subversive results. To bring harmony into the constitution
of this two-side principle, and to solve this antinomy, society gives rise
to a second, which will soon be followed by a third; and progress of social
genius will take place in this manner, until, having exhausted all its
contradictions – I suppose, but it is not proved that there is a limit
to human contradictions – it returns in one leap to all its former positions
and with a single formula solves all its problems.”

(Vol. I p. 133)

Just as the antithesis was before turned into an antidote, so now the thesis
becomes a hypothesis. This change of terms, coming from M. Proudhon, has
no longer anything surprising for us! Human reason, which is anything but
pure, having only incomplete vision, encounters at every step new problems
to be solved. Every new thesis which it discovers in absolute reason and
which is the negation of the first thesis, becomes for it a synthesis,
which it accepts rather naively as the solution of the problem in question.
It is thus that this reason frets and fumes in ever renewing contradictions
until, coming to the end of the contradictions, it perceives that all its
theses and syntheses are merely contradictory hypotheses. In its perplexity,
“human reason, social genius, returns in one leap to all its former positions,
and in a single formula, solves all its problems.” This unique formula,
by the way, constitutes M. Proudhon's true discovery. It is constituted
value.

Hypotheses are made only in view of a certain aim. The aim that
social genius, speaking through the mouth of M. Proudhon, set itself in
the first place, was to eliminate the bad in every economic category, in
order to have nothing left but the good. For it, the good, the supreme
well-being, the real practical aim, is equality. And why did the social
genius aim at equality rather than inequality, fraternity, Catholicism,
or any other principle? Because “humanity has successively realized so
many separate hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis,” which
precisely is equality. In other words: because equality is M. Proudhon's
ideal. He imagines that the division of labour, credit, the workshop –
all economic relations – were invented merely for the benefit of equality,
and yet they always ended up by turning against it. Since history and the
fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, the latter
concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction, it
exists only between his fixed idea and real movement.

Henceforth, the good side of an economic relation is that which
affirms equality; the bad side, that which negates it and affirms inequality.
Every new category is a hypothesis of the social genius to eliminate the
inequality engendered by the preceding hypothesis. In short, equality is
the primordial intention, the mystical tendency, the providential aim
that the social genius has constantly before its eyes as it whirls in the
circle of economic contradictions. Thus, Providence is the locomotive
which makes the whole of M. Proudhon's economic baggage move better than
his pure and volatized reason. He has devoted to Providence a whole chapter,
which follows the one on taxes.

Providence, providential aim, this is the great word used today
to explain the movement of history. In fact, this word explains nothing.
It is at most a rhetorical form, one of the various ways of paraphrasing
facts.

It is a fact that in Scotland landed property acquired a new value
by the development of English industry. This industry opened up new outlets
for wool. In order to produce wool on a large scale, arable land had to
be transformed into pasturage. To effect this transformation, the estates
had to be concentrated. To concentrate the estates, small holdings had
first to be abolished, thousands of tenants had to be driven from their
native soil and a few shepherds in charge of millions of sheep to be installed
in their place. Thus, by successive transformations, landed property in
Scotland has resulted in the driving out of men by sheep. Now say that
the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland
was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential
history.

Of course, the tendency towards equality belongs to our century.
To say now that all former centuries, with entirely different needs, means
of production, etc., worked providentially for the realization of equality
is, firstly, to substitute the means and the men of our century for the
men and the means of earlier centuries and to misunderstand the historical
movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired
by the generations that preceded them. Economists know very well that the
very thing that was for the one a finished product was for the other but
the raw material for new production.

Suppose, as M. Proudhon does, that social genius produced, or
rather improvised, the feudal lords with the providential aim of transforming
the settlers into responsible and equally-placed workers: and you will
have effected a substitution of aims and of persons worthy of the Providence
that instituted landed property in Scotland, in order to give itself the
malicious pleasure of driving out men by sheep.

But since M. Proudhon takes such a tender interest in Providence,
we refer him to the Histoire de l’économie politique of M. de Villeneuve-Bargemont,
who likewise goes in pursuit of a providential aim. This aim, however,
is not equality, but Catholicism.

Seventh and Last Observation

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds
of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism
are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions.
In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds
of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men,
while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that
present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural,
they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and
productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These
relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence
of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus,
there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history,
since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions
of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those
of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and
as such, eternal.

Feudalism also had its proletariat – serfdom, which contained
all the germs of the bourgeoisie. Feudal production also had two antagonistic
elements which are likewise designated by the name of the good side
and the bad side of feudalism, irrespective of the fact that it
is always the bad side that in the end triumphs over the good side. It
is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing
a struggle. If, during the epoch of the domination of feudalism, the economists,
enthusiastic over the knightly virtues, the beautiful harmony between rights
and duties, the patriarchal life of the towns, the prosperous condition
of domestic industry in the countryside, the development of industry organized
into corporations, guilds and fraternities, in short, everything that constitutes
the good side of feudalism, had set themselves the problem of eliminating
everything that cast a shadow on the picture – serfdom, privileges, anarchy
– what would have happened? All the elements which called forth the struggle
would have been destroyed, and the development of the bourgeoisie nipped
in the bud. One would have set oneself the absurd problem of eliminating
history.

After the triumph of the bourgeoisie, there was no longer any
question of the good or the bad side of feudalism. The bourgeoisie took
possession of the productive forces it had developed under feudalism. All
the old economic forms, the corresponding civil relations, the political
state which was the official expression of the old civil society, were
smashed.

Thus, feudal production, to be judged properly, must be considered
as a mode of production founded on antagonism. It must be shown how wealth
was produced within this antagonism, how the productive forces were developed
at the same time as class antagonisms, how one of the classes, the bad
side, the drawback of society, went on growing until the material conditions
for its emancipation had attained full maturity. Is not this as good as
saying that the mode of production, the relations in which productive forces
are developed, are anything but eternal laws, but that they correspond
to a definite development of men and of their productive forces, and that
a change in men's productive forces necessarily brings about a change in
their relations of production? As the main thing is not to be deprived
of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the traditional
forms in which they were produced must be smashed. From this moment, the
revolutionary class becomes conservative.

The bourgeoisie begins with a proletariat which is itself a relic
of the proletariat of feudal times. In the course of its historical development,
the bourgeoisie necessarily develops its antagonistic character, which
at first is more or less disguised, existing only in a latent state. As
the bourgeoisie develops, there develops in its bosom a new proletariat,
a modern proletariat; there develops a struggle between the proletarian
class and the bourgeoisie class, a struggle which, before being felt, perceived,
appreciated, understood, avowed, and proclaimed aloud by both sides, expresses
itself, to start with, merely in partial and momentary conflicts, in subversive
acts. On the other hand, if all the members of the modern bourgeoisie have
the same interests inasmuch as they form a class as against another class,
they have opposite, antagonistic interests inasmuch as they stand face-to-face
with one another. This opposition of interests results from the economic
conditions of their bourgeois life. From day to day it thus becomes clearer
that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a
simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that in the selfsame relations
in which wealth is produced, poverty is also produced; that in the selfsame
relations in which there is a development of the productive forces, there
is also a force producing repression; that these relations produce bourgeois
wealth – i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois class – only by continually
annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by
producing an ever-growing proletariat.

The more the antagonistic character comes to light, the more the
economists, the scientific representatives of bourgeois production, find
themselves in conflict with their own theory; and different schools arise.

We have the fatalist economists, who in their theory are as indifferent
to what they call the drawbacks of bourgeois production as the bourgeois
themselves are in practice to the sufferings of the proletarians who help
them to acquire wealth. In this fatalist school, there are Classics and
Romantics. The Classics, like Adam Smith and Ricardo, represent a bourgeoisie
which, while still struggling with the relics of feudal society, works
only to purge economic relations of feudal taints, to increase the productive
forces and to give a new upsurge to industry and commerce. The proletariat
that takes part in this struggle and is absorbed in this feverish labour
experiences only passing, accidental sufferings, and itself regards them
as such. Economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, who are the historians
of this epoch, have no other mission than that of showing how wealth is
acquired in bourgeois production relations, of formulating these relations
into categories, into laws, and of showing how superior these laws, these
categories, are for the production of wealth to the laws and categories
of feudal society. Poverty is in their eyes merely the pang which accompanies
every childbirth, in nature as in industry.

The romantics belong to our own age, in which the bourgeoisie
is in direct opposition to the proletariat; in which poverty is engendered
in as great abundance as wealth. The economists now pose as blasé fatalists,
who, from their elevated position, cast a proudly disdainful glance at
the human machines who manufacture wealth. They copy all the developments
given by their predecessors, and the indifference which in the latter was
merely naïveté becomes in them coquetry.

Next comes the humanitarian school, which sympathizes with the
bad side of present-day production relations. It seeks, by way of easing
its conscience, to palliate even if slightly the real contrasts; it sincerely
deplores the distress of the proletariat, the unbridled competition of
the bourgeois among themselves; it counsels the workers to be sober, to
work hard and to have few children; it advises the bourgeois to put a reasoned
ardor into production. The whole theory of this school rests on interminable
distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results,
between ideas and application, between form and content, between essence
and reality, between right and fact, between the good side and the bad
side.

The philanthropic school is the humanitarian school carried to
perfection. It denies the necessity of antagonism; it wants to turn all
men into bourgeois; it wants to realize theory in so far as it is distinguished
from practice and contains no antagonism. It goes without saying that,
in theory, it is easy to make an abstraction of the contradictions that
are met with at every moment in actual reality. This theory would therefore
become idealized reality. The philanthropists, then, want to retain the
categories which express bourgeois relations, without the antagonism which
constitutes them and is inseparable from them. They think they are seriously
fighting bourgeois practice, and they are more bourgeois than the others.

Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the
bourgeois class, so the Socialists and Communists are the theoreticians
of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently
developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently so long as
the struggle itself of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet
assumed a political character, and the productive forces are not yet sufficiently
developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch
a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of
the proletariat and for the formation of a new society, these theoreticians
are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise
systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure
that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat
assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their
minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes
and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely
make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they
see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary,
subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment,
science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated
itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become
revolutionary.

Let us return to M. Proudhon.

Every economic relation has a good and a bad side; it is the one
point on which M. Proudhon does not give himself the lie. He sees the good
side expounded by the economists; the bad side he sees denounced by the
Socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations;
he borrows from the Socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty nothing
but poverty. He is in agreement with both in wanting to fall back upon
the authority of science. Science for him reduces itself to the slender
proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search of formulas.
Thus it is that M. Proudhon flatters himself on having given a criticism
of both political economy and communism: he is beneath them both. Beneath
the economists, since, as a philosopher who has at his elbow a magic formula,
he thought he could dispense with going into purely economic details; beneath
the socialists, because he has neither courage enough nor insight enough
to rise, be it even speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon.

He wants to be the synthesis – he is a composite error.

He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and
proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back
and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism.

Notes

*1.
This was perfectly correct for the year 1847. At that time the world
trade of the United States was limited mainly to import of immigrants and
industrial products, and export of cotton and tobacco, i.e., of the products
of southern slave labour. The Northern States produced mainly corn and meat
for the slave states. It was only when the North produced corn and meat
for export and also became an industrial country, and when the American
cotton monopoly had to face powerful competition, in India, Egypt, Brazil,
etc., that the abolition of slavery became possible. And even then this
led to the ruin of the South, which did not succeed in replacing the open
Negro slavery by the disguised slavery of Indian and Chinese coolies, F.E.
[Note by Frederick Engels, to the 1885 German Edition. For more information, see Marx and Engels on the American Civil War]